Information
In order to pay off all the debts accumulated while a student at Oxford, John Betjeman was, in his own plaintive words, ‘reduced to turning an honest penny’. He took a job as private secretary to Sir Horace Plunkett, a former agricultural expert, who was writing a book. He accompanied his employer, who had been in poor health, to the Beresford Hotel, Birchington, for a short stay in February 1929. The hotel, a bungalow in stucture, was designed by the sam,e architect, J.P.Seddon, who designed some of the other ‘Birchington Bungalows’ in the 1870s and 1880s. After achieving a heyday in the 1960s as a 5 star residence, the hotel was demolished in the 1970s. It is very likely that it was from here that Betjeman made his excursion to Westgate on Sea, the subject of one of his earliest published poems.
Quotations
… this hotel is furnished in that Japanese style so popular with the wives of Anglo-Indian colonels who retire to Camberley. There is a ballroom and an ‘Oak and Pewter ‘ room which is very pretty.
Place | Extract |
| Birchington | After achieving a heyday in the 1960s as a 5 star residence, the hotel was demolished in the 1970s... |
| Margate | There were probably subsequent visits, one of which must have taken place in the early years of the second World War, as recorded in the poem ‘Margate, 1940’... |
| Westgate-On-Sea | Notwithstanding, the poem charmingly evokes the orderly, genteel resort of the 1930s , with its balconied housefronts... |
